It doesn’t happen as often as it might on Windows, but from time to time you’ll find that even applications on Mac can freeze, hang, or otherwise cause problems that prevent you from properly closing them down.

On Windows, you’d launch the Task Manager to kill unresponsive processes. On Mac, you’d instead rely on a different but similar utility: the Force Quit prompt.

All you have to do is press Command + Option + Esc and the prompt opens. Here you’ll see all currently active applications on your system regardless of whether or not they’re stuck, frozen, or whatever.

Simply select the application you want to close and click Force Quit. Boom! It’s gone.

We don’t recommend that you do this often because force-quitting doesn’t allow applications to properly save or clean up data before shutting everything down, so you may lose unsaved documents and stuff like that.